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Old news with at least two audio tracks and no video clues.

http://cnl.salk.edu/~tewon/Bli...

Single-channel separation of multiple sources
https://youtu.be/LuBer-0WmpQ

sounds good, but a lot more work to do

http://www.salk.edu/news/press...

Ants are not a good analogy. What they are describing is much more like an adaptive immune system - the "ants" in their system are circulating T-cells. Dr. Rodney Langman, an immunologist from the Salk Institute and UCSD, proposed exactly what the article describes. He described the conceptual elements required to form a synthetic immune system in the early 90's. Initially the goal was to model and understand our own adaptive immunity, but he often used computers and network protection from viruses as examples when explaining the concepts. I was his TA while in grad school.

Synthetic Immunity

If we extrapolate - computer networks will not only be guarded by T-cells that circulate through networks, identify threats, and release proinflammatory markers and antiviral "poisons" - there will be B-cell equivalents that produce antibodies, snippets of code the bind and immobilize specific codes they are designed to recognize. There will also be some degree of autoimmunity as viruses are reworked to mimic benign code. There will be an HIV equivalent (there already are) that targets not just the OS, but the OS defenses themselves. And there will be vaccines - benign code that presented as a virus to train the immune system on a specific type of threat.

Here's an audio clip of its learning progression.

And I recall seeing a TV broadcast showing an experiment where infants were incapable of even hearing certain sounds from one language (e.g. an inuit language with subtle throat-clicking sounds) if they were primarily exposed to another language (say French or English). A baby had to be repeatedly exposed to certain sounds before they could perceive them.

That's bullshit.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. Terry Sejnowski is probably one of the most prominent neuroscientists alive today, and generally knows what he's talking about.

You do not need constancy of material/molecules to keep a memory - in a sense you can exchange a building brick by brick, one at a time, with new bricks, and maintain your building like new, for millenia.

This is true, and undoubtedly works well for short-term and medium-term memories. However, all of this exchange takes energy, and if there's a more energy efficient way of doing things (such as, perhaps, storing memories in the extracellular matrix), evolution would tend to select in favor of it.

Let me explain the experiment, for those of you who are curious about the state of the art in neuro research. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the location in the brain of areas which are active during certain tasks. The task I was given was a memory / reflex test. I was given a button, and shown a sequence of letters at varying rates. I was supposed to press the button when I saw a letter that was identical to the letter shown two letters earlier. So if I saw E-C-E-C-C, I'd press the button on the second E, and again on the second C, but not the third C. (This is a hard enough test without being a medical experiment!)

First, they wired me up for an EEG. This involved sitting still for about 45 minutes while two people stood over me, put a skullcap with wires on my head, and went over each electrical contact with some grease and a little wooden dowel to move the hair out of the way so the electrodes would have good contact with the skin. (The goop washed out in the shower, but it felt funny driving home.) Then they stuck me in the MRI, with a mirror in front of my face at a 45 degree angle so I could look past my feet without sitting up (impossible in that tiny tube). Then they performed the tests.

I was in the tube for about 90 minutes, most of it not moving any muscles except for my finger to press the button. If you move any muscles, your whole brain lights up with activity, and it throws off the readings. It was also noisy in there, because I was laying in the middle of a huge electromagnet being bombarded with radio waves. After it was over, they showed me a 3D brain scan, and I got to see a 2D plot of my brain waves by color (blue for theta waves, green for alpha, red for gamma, etc etc).

Back to the topic at hand. Unless they suddenly find a way to carry around a $1.5M electromagnet, hide it somewhere where no one can see or hear it, convince people to walk through it somehow (Futurama tubes, anyone?), figure out a way to filter out all the extra brain noise from people walking, talking, and doing all the other things we normally do, and somehow interpret the data in a time-relevant manner, there's no way anyone is going to make "brain scanning" work. OTOH, maybe there is a way after all.

For the lazy:

See: http://www.inc.salk.edu/

I noticed something a little odd in the timothy's post - he says

What would Mendel have thought of
this? How about Watson and Crick?

This seems to imply that Watson and Crick are as dead as Mendel, which is just not true. Watson is the president of Cold Spring Harbor research institute. His homepage is here. Crick is also alive and doing some rather interesting research in the neurology of consciousness at the Salk Institute. his homepage is here. I met Dr. Crick while working at the Salk, and he's a really nice guy. I've met a number of famous people in my time, but he really awed me. Its hard to talk to him without thinking about the massive influence he has had on modern biology.

If I had to guess, I'd say that they are both as amazed by modern biology as the rest of us. Who could have guessed we'd be this far so soon? Biology is amazing. Computers are amazing. That's why I do both.

ted